Wireless telephones have become ubiquitous in society, and many people use wireless telephones for a variety of functions. For example, people of all ages commonly use personal wireless telephones. As is well known in the art, this type of wireless telephone is hand-held, and allows the user to both send and receive wireless telephone calls to and from different destinations. Wireless telephone calls may include analog signals, such as analog voice transmissions, digital signals, such as binary data encapsulated according to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the Internet protocol (IP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), or any other suitable protocol or combination of protocols, or a combination of analog and digital signals.
As is also well-known, wireless service carriers, such as AT&T Wireless Service, Inc., provide the infrastructure for wireless communication with this type of wireless telephone. For example, a wireless service carrier will monitor the location of a personal wireless telephone, and route calls for that wireless telephone to the cellular radio tower in that telephone's service area. Similarly, the wireless service carrier will monitor calls from that wireless telephone, and route these calls to their proper wireless telephone network or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) destination.
With many personal wireless telephones, the telephone's wireless service carrier commonly also acts as the telephone's wireless service provider. That is, the wireless service carrier may also be the entity that determines which communication services are available to the wireless telephone, and the costs of these services. Conventionally, a wireless service provider authorizes a personal wireless telephone to receive wireless communication or concierge services according to an agreement, commonly referred to as a wireless service plan, with the telephone's owner (referred to hereafter as the telephone's subscriber). The wireless service plan defines both the services that will be provided to the personal wireless telephone, and the fees that the wireless service provider will charge the telephone's subscriber for providing those services.
For example, a wireless service plan may designate that a wireless service provider will provide a personal wireless telephone with 100 minutes of local wireless and PSTN telephone communication each month for a flat monthly fee of $50, and will provide additional local wireless telephone and PSTN communication at a rate of $1 per minute for every minute thereafter. The wireless service plan may also specify that the subscriber's personal wireless telephone will receive voice mail service for a fee of $10 per month and an incoming caller identification service for an additional $10 per month. If a subscriber subsequently wishes to change the services provided to his or her personal wireless telephone, the subscriber arranges for the change through the wireless service provider.
Vehicle manufacturers also are including wireless telephones in new vehicles. These wireless telephones are not simply personal wireless telephones mounted into a vehicle. Instead, these wireless telephones, hereafter referred to as vehicular wireless telephones, are wireless communication units integrated into the electrical control system of the vehicle. Thus, these vehicular telephones can be used to monitor information related to the vehicle itself, such as the vehicle's engine operating condition and the precise location of the vehicle. These vehicular telephones may even be used to control the operation of the vehicle. For example, some vehicular telephones can unlock a vehicle's doors, honk the vehicle's horn, and even flash the vehicle's lights.
Of course, in addition to providing communication services directly related to the operation of the vehicle, vehicular telephones may also be used to perform other functions or to receive other services. For example, with some vehicular telephones, the vehicle's driver may employ the vehicular wireless telephone to obtain concierge services, such as navigation directions, arranging for reservations with restaurants and airlines, requesting roadside assistance. The vehicular telephone may also receive (and even display) image data, such as data transmitted according to the TCP/IP protocol (e.g., Web pages written in a markup language, such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)) or data encoded according to a Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard, or other types of data, such as Voice Extensible Markup Language (XML) data.
Like personal wireless telephones, wireless service carriers provide wireless communication for the vehicular wireless telephones. Unlike personal wireless telephones, however, the wireless service provider who authorizes services for a vehicular wireless telephone is usually different than the wireless service carrier that provides communication for the vehicular wireless telephone. That is, the wireless service provider typically is an entity associated with the vehicle, such as the vehicle's manufacturer or an organization affiliated with the vehicle's manufacturer (e.g., a subsidiary of the vehicle's manufacturer), rather than a wireless service carrier.
With this arrangement, the vehicular wireless telephone's subscriber may have no contact with the wireless service carrier actually used by the vehicular wireless telephone to communicate. Instead, the subscriber may deal only with the wireless service provider that determines the services offered to the vehicular wireless telephone. The vehicle's subscriber may thus enter into a wireless service plan with the wireless service provider, rather than with the wireless service carrier that will actually provide wireless communication for the vehicular wireless telephone.
While both personal wireless telephones and vehicular wireless telephones offer their subscriber's a variety of features, the current operation of these wireless telephones present a number of limitations for users who subscribe to both personal wireless telephone service and vehicular wireless telephone service. For example, with conventional vehicular wireless telephones, a subscriber's personal wireless telephone cannot communicate with the subscriber's vehicular wireless telephone. Thus, with conventional vehicular telephones, a subscriber cannot exchange information (e.g., stored telephone numbers) between the subscriber's personal wireless telephone and the subscriber's vehicular wireless telephone, or call his or her vehicular wireless telephone from his or her personal wireless telephone. Further, a subscriber cannot have information intended for the subscriber's personal wireless telephone relayed to his or her vehicular wireless telephone, or vice versa.
In addition, while a subscriber's service plan for a vehicular wireless telephone may offer the subscriber a number of beneficial services (e.g., travel directions or concierge services), the subscriber can only enjoy easy access to these services from the vehicular telephone. If a subscriber tries to obtain these services from his or her personal wireless telephone, the subscriber usually must provide a personal identification code or other data to identify the subscriber.
Further, a subscriber must typically pay two separate subscription fees, a first fee under the service plan for the subscriber's personal wireless telephone and a second fee under the service plan for the subscriber's vehicular wireless telephone. As these fees are for a full portfolio of services to each telephone, they may be large, and a subscriber may be forced to discontinue one of the subscriptions to save money. For example, a subscriber who frequently uses his or her personal telephone but only occasionally uses his or her vehicular telephone may decide to discontinue service for the vehicular wireless telephone, rather than to continue to pay two large subscription fees. Thus, the current differentiation between personal wireless telephone service and vehicular wireless telephone service has disadvantages to the wireless service providers for both personal wireless telephones and vehicular wireless telephones, and may also impose unnecessarily large service fees for a subscriber.